Documentation 14 - Beta Version Playtesting
I had 17 playtesters who had played the game's beta version and filled out the survey. According to their feedback, there are some hits and misses:
HITs:
The story is engaging and immersive. They love the story and felt easily resonates with the characters. They felt the game scenes were realistic and emotional, and they thought the story was working well functionally for meeting the game goal.
They love the game mechanics that there are face-to-face conversations and messenger-style conversations. They like the conflicts and the choices they have in the game.
They love the UI design, the images, and the sound effects. Although some thought they would prefer the real music, most of them liked the ambient sound.
MISSes:
Resolution issues: some playtesters encountered resolutions and legibility issues that there are overlapping buttons and some elements not aligning well.
Solution: I will keep working on the UI to make the game easy to interact with on any device.
Monetary design: Since the time is limited, I don’t have time to do a complete paper prototype of the monetary. The stats are not working well along with the storytelling, and choosing all the worst choices goes to the excellent ending. I was shocked when I first knew the problem, and I will redesign the weights to make them work better for narrations.
Stats inspector: Many playtesters found the stats inspector is not apparent enough. They didn’t notice it at the first minute, and they had trouble reading it. I will add sound effects to notify players when the stats/facial expressions change and numbers to show their difference in the stats bar.
There are still some problems besides the ones I had above. I will keep working on it to polish the game to help the target audiences ASAP. Here’s the link to the summarization of the playtesting.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yzs_EtYH1ktZsANRoxaxnyEFkT2mY5CbpX36hsUYbWg/edit?usp=sharing